December 30, 2011

And Verizon's recent ads "highlighted its technicians’ dress shirts" and "characterize the install as a white glove experience."

That's from a NYT article — promoted top and center on its front webpage — called "Today’s Cable Guy, Upgraded and Better-Dressed." The photo at the link shows a clean-shaven, crewcut cable guy — with white paper booties over his shoes to protect the gleaming hardwood floor — demonstrating how to use the TV to a woman standing by her side. There's a second photo of another cable guy — also in booties. He's the bearded type. This better class of men will come to your house and help you set up the company's elaborate "suite of products."

"My genius husband had the router in the basement," joked the homeowner, Kathleen Hassinger, a 39-year-old mother of three daughters...

Now — it's been obvious to me for quite a while — the New York Times is written for women. But at what point does it actually become... ridiculous...

[Selene Tovar, 35, a stay-at-home mother of three] needed the Internet service at her three-story home in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood to be fast enough to power the family’s six televisions, five Xboxes, several PlayStations and multiple iPads and laptops. Even a new scale — a Hanukkah present from her husband — required a fast connection so it could send daily weigh-ins to an iPhone app.

Note the clueless husband: thinks a scale is a nice gift. Coming to Ms. Tovar's aid was Quirino Madia who "wore a white button-down shirt and gray slacks."

But watch out, affluent ladies of New York, "many cable technicians still wear the standard work clothes and tool belts."

***

And I'm sure it's got nothing to do with anything the New York Times would ever have intended to allude to, but reading that article made me want to Google "cable guy pornography," just to see how prevalent that genre was. I don't know. That's just the direction my mind went. Not that I clicked on any of the links. I didn't. And my Google search only retrieved about 4 million hits, so maybe it's not such a big porn sub-genre. I don't know if the new "fashion-forward look" will heat up the sub-genre or not. Actually, I think not. But I'm no porn connoisseur. I'm more of a Google-search connoisseur. For example, I moved on to the search: "fashion-forward cable guy porn" — 192,000 results — and found "James Franco Porn Documentary: Disappointing Sex Tape Inspires Film," an article in HuffPo (the San Francisco edition). Speaking of disappointing! James Franco does not appear as a fashion-forward cable guy in any porn film. Apparently, one time Franco made a home video with his girlfriend a realized: "Those people in pornos, they are great performers. They're not just doing it, they're selling it to an audience." The guy's a genius!

***

Rereading this post, I suddenly see what the real porn is for the ladies who read the New York Times: "three-story home in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood."

51 comments:

I never knew before who this stuff was written for, before Althouse, with the chip-shot by rhhardin.

Great piece, especially in recognizing the real porn-for-NYT women here.

Not just the great house, but also:• "white glove experience" for a mundane task• the "clean-shaven, crewcut cable guy"• the white paper booties over his shoes • the gleaming hardwood floor• pressed slacks and a sporty fleece jacket • "Signature Home” • fashion-forward

20 years ago I would read two sentences and then skim and read the last two, never knowing what the hell was the point. Now I get it.

Now, you know: when you have 5 people in the family, an appropriate number of TVs is: 6. But only 5 Xboxes. So... what is the location of the TV that doesn't have an Xbox? The wife's bathroom? Where we find the scale that needs an internet connection? Who knows what other high tech devices might serve the lady's bodily needs? A whirlpool bathtub that analyzes her tweets and Facebook updates and calculates what degree of pounding she requires?

"My genius husband had the router in the basement," joked the homeowner, Kathleen Hassinger, a 39-year-old mother of three daughters..."

how could the genius wife allow this to happen? At my old house, I also had the router in the basement. The cable company signal wasn't strong enough to make it thru a splinter to get it upstairs, and the cable company told me, despite it working fine for 2 years upstairs, that the issue was n my side and I had to place it where the cable entered the house. So into the basement it went, where it worked fine until I moved.

Back in the mid 70s, (I was in college) Orkin (pest control) used to run this commercial with a good looking guy standing next to his Orkin car talking about how all you had to do was pick up the phone and... "I'll be right over". I never thought anything about it until a gay friend pointed out that this was porn for housewives. It was obvious when you looked at it like that.

BTW, "router" is a misnomer - "routing" is directing traffic between networks, so a router is the device that acts as that gateway. This can be located anywhere, preferably close to the network demarc (where the wire enters your house and becomes your problem).

Nowadays, routers are built with wireless access points baked in, but that's really a separate function; media conversion, transforming electrical to radio waves and back, on the same network. It's convenient to have them on the same box, but sometimes creates a conflict as the best place for the wireless signal to emanate from isn't the ideal place for the router, and vice versa.

If wireless signal won't reach the far corners the simple solution is a dedicated wireless repeater or a separate AP that can be configured to provide that functionality.

The whole clean-cut cable guy thing for women may not be far off. In a book by Larry King, I read that the only thing Lenny Bruce got convicted for in Florida had to do with donations he had collected for a leper colony he had found in that state.

No, it had nothing to do with the money, which he collected, accounted for, and dispensed all in accordance with applicable laws. The problem was, when he went around asking for donations, he was dressed as a priest. He would drive around wealthy neighborhoods in his fancy convertable, and go door to door in clerical garb, asking lonely Catholic housewives for their contributions.

There really is a difference between millionaires and billionaires and owning a three story house in Chelsea is the dividing marker. Although I doubt billionaires have anything to fear from the NY Times or Obama and his minions in OWS. It's cable guys they're after.

As usual, all ridiculous situations in life are fully discussed within The Big Lebowski:

Sherry in 'Logjammin': [on television video] You must be here to fix the cable.

Maude Lebowski: Lord. You can imagine where it goes from here.

The Dude: He fixes the cable?

Maude Lebowski: Don't be fatuous, Jeffrey.

BTW, that wife sounds like an entitled moron. If she wanted a guy who is a great cable installer, she should have married a cable guy, not a top shelf lawyer or financier or real estate developer. If there's any justice in the world, he'll get to feature in an NYT article about rich, entitled wives of no particular merit who publicly emasculate their hard working husbands, and he'll be quoted as referring to her as, "my wife, the cable guy groupie."

If there's any justice in the world, he'll get to feature in an NYT article about rich, entitled wives of no particular merit who publicly emasculate their hard working husbands, and he'll be quoted as referring to her as, "my wife, the cable guy groupie.

Maybe he's mentioned as a john in the NYT article about the prostitute. With a harridan like that at home, how could you blame him?

"My genius husband had the router in the basement," joked the homeowner, Kathleen Hassinger, a 39-year-old mother of three daughters...

As is mine, where it stays nice and cool and works just fine. It's on a shelf in a stack with the cable modem, an eight port managed gigabit switch, a VOIP gateway, and an HDTV ethernet-connected tuner. That stack sits right next to my freenas file server with a four-drive zfs raid array.

Or it could be the liberal elitist way to help keep up the egalitarian pretext--re-style the service people to make them appear to be more affluent than they probably are so that you don't feel guilty when they help you engage in conspicuous consumption.

I prefer the NYT product placement to Limbaugh and others' incomeatyourhouse.com* scam.

Just think of how many stupid right wingers pay people for the opportunity to sell $40 bottles of fruit juice to their friends.

Hugh Hewitt got (is still getting?) poor people to pay credit repair companies to offer advice such as "pay your bills on time." Do some research to see what these credit repair vultures do to the most economically ignorant among us. Shameless bastards.

Many right wingers feel their job is to find the dumbest people in America and assure them no buyer needs to beware ever. Most left wingers are worse.

“I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

I believe William F. Buckley Jr. believed the above quote to mean, in context, live with God in your mind, not gold.

I think the cable companies realize we don't want to buy elaborate new systems and deal with the setup and learning curve because TV is simply not worth the trouble.

So all these glitzy brochures about the latest tech gizmos is pretty well a waste--like the ski magazines that feature only snow gods whizzing down Mt. Everest at 90 MPH on space age skis. That scares most of us into maybe reading a book instead.

I'm still stuck on a bathroom scale that requires high-speed internet. I mean, what is it sending? High-definition CAT scans of the silly bint? An integer figure could just as easily be sent by Morse code as by 802.11.

On a bathroom scale as a gift: passive-aggressive behavior by a husband married to a woman who will criticize him to the world in the NYT? (If she does that, she obviously criticizes him to their friends all the time.)

Turn about is fair play, and this doesn't even approximate turn about. A rich husband goes out to the work world where he gets to meet lots of women every day. He wears a suit, and they do their best to look good. Lots of sexual frisson is you're out in the world... The stay at home wife stays at home and gets to see the cable installer or washing machine repairmen perhaps once a year, if that. I would bet that that lots of these repairment don't look anything like pornstars, and, anyway, male pornstars aren't very good looking. I don't begrudge these women their sad attempt to find a few random sparks of sexual heat, and I certainly hope that they're not wearing a housedress and curlers when the repairmen comes.

[Selene Tovar, 35, a stay-at-home mother of three] needed the Internet service at her three-story home in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood to be fast enough to power the family’s six televisions, five Xboxes, several PlayStations and multiple iPads and laptops.